Author Archives: Forrest Perrine

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An teacher of mine once said not to worry about if something has been done before, but instead of what you think has not been done enough. Jackie Gendel looks to be a die hard fan of Henri Matisse and André Derain, and feels the work they started has not been finished. It’s interesting to see how a style which was so radical a hundred years ago that a critic claimed in contempt that the work had been made by “wild beasts,” yet painted today seems perfectly beautiful and comfortable. The radicalism is gone, yet Gendel carries their spirit of autonomy of lines and colors. If you like what you see, you can see more of it at the Jeff Bailey Gallery until November 10.

Israeli inventor Izhar Gafni recently developed a bicycle that is pretty amazing in a lot of different ways. Not only is it made out of cardboard, it’s sustainable, durable, functional, super light, looks like a bike, and only costs 9$ to produce, which means he can sell it for $20 a piece. Everything about it is amazing. Not the least of which is his inspiring determination to realize such a seemingly impossible idea. I’m really crossing my fingers that this goes into mega production and opens some doors for a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to the wonderful world of bicycles and transportation. Watch the video after the jump to see his process; it’s a real day-maker.( via )

A friend just came back from Brooklyn with New York based artist/designer Tim Lahan‘s art zine Still Life With Sex Tape, and man is it a joy to look at. His drawings are simple, graphic, and funny. It mostly consists of taking ultra banal, overlooked objects and moments, reducing them to a few distinctive lines, warping them a little, and in doing so makes them silly, interesting, and just plain cool. If you like what you see, you can order his zine from Smalltime Books. They’re only ten bucks, made on recycled paper, and free shipping to boot– there’s no reason not to have this in your life! More of his zine along with some of his still life drawings after the jump.

Chris Sisarich’s photo series Somewhere In The Middle of Nowhere hits home here in Los Angeles, a city built in a desert. The series looks like it could have been anywhere around the world–saudi arabia, egypt, arizona, china, california– and speaks to our constant search for new places for sprawl development and the global warming it’s causing, to our persistance and the futileness of it all. Sisarich’s images, like the desert, are some of the driest, palest images i’ve seen in a while, and with humanity only peripherally represented, the might seem like predictions for our uncertain future. But they don’t feel pessimistic, just as if humanity was this interesting thing that out grew its planet and left behind some neat objects when it left. Whether or not you think the images are prophetic, optimistic, pessimistic, or anything else, they are at the lest very handsome images.

Eric Sall‘s paintings wild little worlds. Their use of graphic lines and bold colors invites you in with the fleeting impression of cartoon familiarity, but the second you come get into them you’re taken on a whirlwind tour of psychedelic movement and color. Sall’s paintings are a perfect mix of unreal, drug-induced, semi-spiritual visions with just enough familiar shapes and lines to keep you looking for something you know is there, like an epiphanic episode where you can’t quite put your finger on exactly what this life changing realization is that just came to you. As you’ll see after the jump, his installation style reminds me a lot of how Ed Templeton hangs his photography, but more so. If you have time, you should take the next fifteen minutes to really get lost in these.

Heeseop Yoon is a Korean artist based in New York concerned with clutter, junk, and our impossibility of absolute perception. His enormous installations begin with photographs of people’s piles of hoarded objects, which, like Giacometti, he then draws and re-draws and re-draws, leaving initial lines to remind him of the instability of his own perception, then re-draws them on enormous scale using tape (which is a form of junk in its own right) galleries and on buildings. The combination of cluttered objects and the instability of perception is a pretty perfect one, they feel like the exact opposite of Gursky’s 99 Cent store photograph yet weirdly similar, both enormous in scale, both about the glut of objects in our society, but executed in inverse manners. His pen and paper drawings are amazing too, check out his website to see more!

Julie Schenkelberg makes installations that look like domestic earthquakes. Her monumental pieces talk to us about the collective memory we share in objects and its inevitable disintegration. As most all domestic objects have some sort of function, their ubiquity–tables, chairs, lamps, plates, etc in every home– is a sign that our experience of the life is much more communal than individual, and likewise our memories. Julie takes the objects of our experience and compiles them into globs of memory, as they are probably situated in our own brains. But, like our own memories, she shows us these objects as broken and decaying in structures that look strong and sound but are, in the grand scheme of things, utterly tenuous. Her work is physical poetry at its best.

Melanie Daniel explodes forms, objects, patterns, and color to make her paintings and the results are joyfully apocalyptic dreams. She gives us some recognizable forms–an arch, a fench, a tower, fish?– forms which make us turn much of the painting into a Rorschach test– Are those rectangle strokes cars? Are those squares buildings? Are those black lines woods that have overrun an industrial town? Or maybe they’re all just rectangles, squares, and lines, there to overwhelm us in this dreamscape. Whatever the case, her paintings are optical quick sand, making it difficult to stop looking and thinking about the worlds in front of you. Her show at the Asya Geisberg Gallery ends on the 20th, so try to stop by while you still can!